How Can MySQL Fulltext Search Enhance Search Results Relevance?

Optimizing MySQL Fulltext Search Results for Relevance

When working with MySQL, sorting results based on relevancy can enhance user experience and streamline data retrieval. While the given query effectively retrieves rows with matching translations, it lacks the specificity to prioritize exact matches. To address this issue, consider utilizing MySQL's fulltext search capabilities.

Fulltext search allows for more granular matching and provides a relevance score for each returned row. This score represents how closely a row aligns with the search query, allowing it to rank results based on similarity. To leverage fulltext search, modify the query as follows:

$query = "SELECT *, MATCH(translation) AGAINST('word') AS relevance FROM `vocabulary` WHERE MATCH(translation) AGAINST('word') OR translation LIKE '%word%' ORDER BY relevance DESC";

In this optimized query:

• MATCH(translation) AGAINST('word') calculates relevance scores for each row based on the search term 'word'.
• ORDER BY relevance DESC sorts the results in descending order of relevance, effectively prioritizing exact matches.

By incorporating fulltext search, you can now display results with exact matches at the top, ensuring relevance and improving user satisfaction.

The above is the detailed content of How Can MySQL Fulltext Search Enhance Search Results Relevance?. For more information, please follow other related articles on the PHP Chinese website!